The pertinence of this to the genre fiction scene is inescapable… from an interview with Clay Shirky at The Guardian:
If you pick a magazine at random, it will not interest you. For people who care about quality, it’s easier to find it online. If it’s a highly qualified niche magazine, something aimed at surgeons or firefighters, it’s going online. There’s no reason those things should exist.
My bold. Your comments?
This month in Blasphemous Geometries: the life-span of the Bush administration has seen an astonishing proliferation of super hero cinema.
Jonathan McCalmont compares the rhetoric of American foreign and domestic policy with the thematic underpinnings of the super hero movie genre, and explains why he’ll be as glad to see the back of costumed crusaders as he will the back of Bush.
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With the Bush era rumbling to a long overdue end, some critics have turned their gin-shortened attentions to the question of which cultural artefact best incapsulates W’s period in office. One popular yardsticks are the ways in which the Presidency has been depicted through film and TV. The Clinton era, for example, has come to be seen as a period of intensely human and libidinous cinematic Presidents such as those of Ivan Reitman’s Dave (1993) and Rob Reiner’s The American President (1995). In fact, were it not for films such as Independence Day (1996) and Air Force One (1997) asserting the President’s penchant for arse-kicking you could be forgiven for forgetting that while Clinton claimed to feel people’s pain, he was no slouch when it came to meting it out in the form of air strikes and deciding, for the first time, that the spread of WMDs was a military matter.
However, while the Bush era has been quick to provide us with Presidents who are either mentally unstable religious zealots (Battlestar Galactica) or bloodless pragmatists more eager to seek revenge than examine the facts (The Sum of all Fears [2002]), the enduring cinematic icon of the Bush era is undeniably the super hero. Continue reading Super Hero Fatigue – Why I am Tired of American Rubber
The current conflict in Palestine is highlighting the potential of the web to become a battlefront in wars both large and small. Internet Evolution reports that Jihadist hacker groups have been cracking and defacing websites all over the world, and that a website called “Help Israel Win” is offering a software download that adds your machine into a pro-Israel botnet, presumably to be deployed against Hamas-related targets in DDoS attacks. [image by Kevin Zollman]
Leaving the politics and ideology of the conflict in question entirely aside for the moment (there are plenty of other sites and threads where you can go and have that argument if you really want to*), it’s fascinating to see someone deploying a voluntary botnet… and it’s a sign of things to come, as it won’t take long for small globally-distributed pressure groups of all kinds to realise that the power of a linked network of computers can give them leverage against their targets. Remember the anti-vivisection hackers who sent a virus to MIT?
But it’s also sad to see that the internet – touted back in the glory days of the late nineties as the global village that would bring us all closer together – has become just another place for us to fight one another. Who’d have thought the lord of the flies would upload himself behind us? [story via SlashDot and Spiraltwist of the Whitechapel Massive]
[ * Seriously, I’m going to delete comments that are partisan to either side of the Gaza conflict, so don’t bother. Regardless of history, religion or politics, innocent people are dying in the dirt. Neither side can justify that. ]
If you pay attention to the tabloid media in the US and the UK, you’ll be familiar with the idea that immigration is a terrible problem that must be stemmed at all cost, with hordes of desperate foreigners waiting beyond our borders to steal away scraps of our hard-earned prosperity and run our public services into the ground. [image by mockstar]
According to Fred Pearce of New Scientist, however, there’s another way of looking at the present system which doesn’t portray those of us in the richest nations as the victims: it’s a form of legitimised apartheid.
It has always struck me as odd that we are so keen to allow the flow of cash and goods across borders without let or hindrance, but try so hard to deny the same rights to people. That is both unfair and a denial of the free-market theories on which much of the world’s economy is built.
Surely if free trade and the free movement of capital is so good for an efficient global economy, then the same should apply to the free movement of labour?
I can’t see the fault in that logic. And for the apostles of the free market to deny it reeks to me of racism and xenophobia. Worse, the stench is disguised by a cheap perfume of do-gooding development theory and environmental hand-wringing.
Pearce goes on to suggest that strict border controls actually give us what we really want – economic disparity, and an easily cowed pool of illegal immigrant labour to do the jobs that no citizen will take for the money we’re willing to pay.
There are definitely some big holes in Pearce’s theory behind the rhetoric, but he’s also pointing at some rather uncomfortable truths. So here’s your challenge for the comments: argue against Pearce without falling back on arguments such as “why not make your own country as great as the one you want to move to”, and without making sweeping generalisations about people based on their race or nationality. Go!
Know how to make a virtual human avatar that could convincingly interact with a family member? If so, the U.S. Department of Defense wants to talk to you. Its Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury is seeking proposals for a Virtual Dialogue Application for Families of Deployed Service Members.
We are looking for innovative applications that explore and harness the power of advanced interactive multimedia computer technologies to produce compelling interactive dialogue between a Service member and their families via a pc- or web-based application using video footage or high-resolution 3-D rendering. The child should be able to have a simulated conversation with a parent about generic, everyday topics. For instance, a child may get a response from saying “I love you”, or “I miss you”, or “Good night mommy/daddy.” This is a technologically challenging application because it relies on the ability to have convincing voice-recognition, artificial intelligence, and the ability to easily and inexpensively develop a customized application tailored to a specific parent. We are seeking development of a tool which can be used to help families (especially, children) cope with deployments by providing a means to have simple verbal interactions with loved ones for re-assurance, support, affection, and generic discussion when phone and internet conversations are not possible. The application should incorporate an AI that allows for flexibility in language comprehension to give the illusion of a natural (but simple) interaction. The current solicitation is not aiming to build entertainment, but a highly accurate and advanced simulation platform.
Slate.com columnist William Saletan seems to like the idea, though he does concede that “Critics call the proposal “creepy” and “dystopian.”
[Spooky Hologram by atmasphere]